We attended a performance last night at the Philadelphia Orchestra of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I won't pretend to know the violin soloist's name. He was a middle-aged Italian man, tall and slender. Nor will I attempt to judge his effort. It sounded wonderful, and I know too little to qualify as a judge otherwise. But his work reenforced my belief that to play a violin very well has to be one of the most, if not the most, fulfilling of human activities, particularly when the instrument is one of the finest ever made. A violin, cradled in the arm and tucked under the chin, seems to be about as intimate as any musical instrument can be. I imagine that the vibration, the resonance of the thin, curved wood, the maple and ash and spruce, has to be like the breathing and pulse of a living being, and to hear those sounds so closely, to physically envelop them with arms and hands and chest and cheek, seems as if it would be the equal of -- and perhaps superior to -- the best love-making. The  violin whispers, it swells, it soothes and stimulates. In another life . . .

A purpose of the Maine voyage this summer was overcoming a long-standing issue: Trips haunted by schedules. The fact that Robin stopped in Boston resulted in a conscious decision under way not to push to make a Maine landfall by the time Monica's plane landed in Manchester, New Hampshire. As a result, we got to discover a port we'd never visited and a unique marina. Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina is actually in East Boston, across the harbor from downtown Boston. There the price of a slip is about half the going rate on the Boston waterfront. And we got a view that we would have missed were Robin at a waterfront dock.
But wait. You get more in the shipyard and marina, where mjm boats builds million-dollar power boats, a Navy destroyer was berthed for repairs and you see the sun set behind the Boston skyline.
You get art. More precisely, sculpture.
Thanks to a number of sponsoring non-profit groups, every building in this sprawling shipyard and most spaces between building are decorated with sculptures. Monica's favorite was the mermaid.

Welded out of what appeared to be scrap metal, she flows atop one of the many buildings that abut the old, sometimes rotting piers in the shipyard. A representation of barnacle tracks or perhaps coral descends the brick siding of the same building.

But wait! There's more. Catching your eye first if you visit by automibile has to be the cod, also welded from scraps.

                 

We would recommend that anyone visiting Boston take the short drive through the tunnel to East Boston and there drive to the end of Marginal Street for a free art experience. Then you could have a meal at Rino's place a few blocks to the north, where you might sample the coconut sorbet, the absolutely best desert I've ever consumed. But that's another story.

Robin arrived on the Boston waterfront to great fanfare.

Turned out there was another celebrity in the harbor, the USS Constitution, out for a parade with all hands on deck.

In late May, Tom Gilmore agreed to help me take Robin to Newport, R.I., for the start of the 2013 Bermuda 1-2, which I had entered. It was only after we had passed through Cape May and were on the  Atlantic that I realized that I really didn't want to race this year. So that night, we docked in Atlantic City and   couple of days later, we headed back to the Chesapeake.
I'd had too much on my plate. Monica had told me as much all spring. Trying to complete the first draft of a manuscript and prepare for an ocean race were more than I was prepared to do. But I didn't like the idea of bailing out on a voyage, and with time to think about it, I had some regrets -- particularly the following Friday when the race started and Robin was 300 miles away. As it turned out, I missed one of the roughest 1-2s on record, one in which several boats did not finish and one actually sank.
By mid-July, my psyche was healed and I asked Monica if she wanted to cruise in Maine. She did. So I asked Tom if he wanted to resume our voyage. He -- surprisingly -- did.
He stayed with me through New York City and Hell Gate on the East River. When he stepped ashore in Port Washington, Long Island, I was one contented sailor, with a good cruise ahead of me.

I created this blog in 2009 in order to have a place to write regularly once my work at Soundings was over. Since February, I've been devoting my efforts to the book Rescue of the Bounty. That work is almost complete. At the end of next week, I'll send back the copy-edited pages and will have no more to do. Publication by Scribner is scheduled for April.
Writing that book with Michael Tougias has been consuming and has affected the rest of life. But we've had some other advetures tucked into the nooks of the weeks and months. I'll take time now to remember some of those events, like the passag through Eggamoggin Reach in Maine in late August, when we saw New York 30 #1, Alera, above, ghosting off Brooklin, Maine.

The Coast Guard hearing investigating the loss of the tall ship Bounty has taken some intersteing turns over the last week. The most intersting came Friday in the testomony of third mate Dan Cleveland.
Commander Kevin Carroll, as he has with many other witnesses, asked Cleveland his impression of a statement made by the Bounty's captain, Robin Walbridge, to a videographer in Belfast, Maine. The videographer had posed a question about sailing Bounty in foul weather.
Walbridge replied that there is no such thing as bad weather.
"We chase hurricanes," the skipper told the videographer.
Most mariners -- even amateur sailors like I -- thought that statement was absurd.
Carroll wanted to know what Cleveland thought.
The answer demonstrated how gray the area of "facts" can be.
Cleveland said in the four years he had sailed aboard Bounty, he had never heard Walbridge make a comment like that.
But, Cleveland said, what he thought Walbridge was referring to was not chasing hurricanes but following them. [I'm not attempting to quote Cleveland directly. I'm trying for the sense of what he said.]
If Bounty could tuck in behind a hurricane after it passed, it could "chase" after it in fair, strong winds on a smooth sea, Cleveland suggested. In fact, he had done just that under Walbridge's command, he said.
To me, the explanation made perfect sense. Walbridge's glib comment wasn't looney at all.
The hearing has three more days to go. Then Commander Carroll will have months to sift the information his has gathered, to attempt to find black and white in all that gray.
Still to be decided: Was there as sane reason for Walbridge to leave New London and, three days later, sail across the path of an historic hurricane. I'm waiting to see.

The first day of the Coast Guard investigative hearing on the loss of the tall ship HMS Bounty is past. The owner of the Bounty, Robert Hansen, a wealthy Long Island businessman, took the Fifth and wouldn't talk. First Mate John Svendsen, 41, was grilled for about four hours and gave all the blame for taking the ship into the path of Hurricane Sandy to his dead captain, Robin Walbridge. The parents of dead crew member Claudene Christian were there, represented by a lawyer who spent every opportunity showing them how valuable he was and, as a consequence, getting over-ruled by the Coast Guard commander who is the lead investigator.
I'm not sure what was learned.
Commander Carroll kept coming back to the video posted on You-Tube in which Capt. Walbridge seems to boast that the Bounty "chases hurricanes." He wanted to know whether Svendsen saw the ship chasing hurricanes and if that's what it was doing when it was caught by Sandy and sunk off North Carolina.
I'm curious to hear what other crew members may see. I've spent about six hours talking with one young Bounty crew member whose vivid description of the hours aboard when they sailed from New London, CT toward the storm is gut-wrenching. And we're not done talking.
This is going to be a thrilling story to write when we've gathered all the information. Here's hoping we are able to answer some of the many questions that I believe these hearings will fail to address.

I'm writing this on the new Dell laptop. Last night, I attempted to take the minutes of the monthly meeting of our local boat club -- the Red Dragon Canoe Club -- on this machine. It was a scary proposition. About every 17 key strokes, a header template appeared on the screen in blue. I had no idea why, except that I was deploying my fingers in a way that brushed some surface wired to create headers.
Now I'm typing on a keyboard separate from the laptop, and I have a mouse plugged in to a USB port so I won't have to use the touch pad on the laptop. I'm not making too many mistakes, and when I do, I can correct them without sending the laptop into an alternative digital universe.
When it comes to avoiding more modern technology, I may have discovered a useful path.

I've discovered a compelling argument for gun control.
It's called Windows 8.
For the Bounty project, which will require scores of interviews, I decided it would be smart to replace the laptop that I got, used, when I joined Soundings Magazine in 2005. It's a good old wagon, but it's about to break down.
So like a thoroughly modern man, I went to the nearest big box store -- Best Buy -- and found a modestly priced Toshiba that looked like it would work. I didn't know a thing about the operating system and, had I asked, it would have meant little to me when they said it was Windows 8.
I asked for the Microsoft Office software, which boosted the price by about one third, paid the bill and went home.
Turning the machine on was as simple as pushing a button. There ended the simplicity. I needed help just to find the machine's "desktop". I called the 800 number. The fellow (not in Asia but in Florida, I think) tried and tried to help me before he told me to take the machine back to the store.
At the store, a man who seemed knowledgeable and competent spent about 45 minutes trying to show me how Windows 8 works. Then he said: "You're just going to have to get used to it," even as he looked at the glaze on my eyes. He told me I had to move ahead with the times.
The experience was similar to what you might feel if you walked into a Chevy dealer (or pick any brand) and said: I'd like to buy a new car, and the salesperson replied: Sorry, we don't sell cars any more. You're going to have to learn to fly a jet.
Another example: Your alarm sounds in the morning and the first person you encounter -- maybe your wife or husband -- is speaking Russian, as is everyone else whom you meet that day.
Suddenly, the language of computers with which I'm familiar has been replaced by something that's entirely different, that shares nothing with the Windows XP that I've been using or even with Windows 7.
I took the Toshiba to customer service and returend it. Late last night, I found a Dell computer on amazon - new -- that I could buy with Windows 7 installed. It's supposed to be delivered during the week.
But there was a time at Best Buy when, had I access to an assault rifle, I would have repelled the digital assault that was being inflicted on me and taken out as many computers and computer sales people as there were bullets in my magazine. And I would have felt (momentarily) justified.

On December 11, I received an email from noted author Michael Tougias, inviting me to co-author a book with him about the loss of the tall ship HMS Bounty.
I agreed.
Mike is the author of five survival-at-sea books, the latest, A Storm Too Soon, published just last week. He has tremendous contacts in the publishing world. I'd be a fool not to jump at this offer. So, without hesitation, I jumped.
Today, we got a contract agreement with Simon & Schuster. The manuscript is due on the editor's desk by the end of the year.
Mike and I have been working on the book since the day he called. The Bounty went down on October 29 off of Cape Hatteras during Hurricane Sandy. Fourteen of the crew of 16 were rescued by the Coast Guard. One female crew member died and the captain was lost at sea.
So far, the survivors have been reluctant to talk with us. But I've been able to conduct a half dozen interviews with nautical experts and with former Bounty crew members.
Besides telling the story of the ship's final few days, our job will be to come as close as possible to answering the questions that began circulating as soon as the maritime community learned that the Bounty had set sail from New London, CT, on a path headed straight for a hurricane. Some have suggested that the captain was suicidal, some that he was homicidal for putting his crew in such danger. Many have claimed he was crazy.
I'm hoping that, through interviews not only with his crew members but with family members and others who knew him, we will be able to find a clear path to the actual truth.
The first step in that process is the official Coast Guard hearing scheduled in Portsmouth, VA, from February 12 to 21. I'll be attending every hour of that hearing, documenting the testimony and, I hope, meeting every person who appears before the hearing officer.
As the research progresses, I'll attempt to update my understanding at this site.